We love it when the entire Automattic team gets together – it gives us an opportunity to hang out and work side-by-side. During our last meetup in San Francisco, fellow Aussies, Beau Lebens and Alex Shiels, sat down to brainstorm some ways to improve our Akismet spam filter integration in IntenseDebate. A short-while later they cranked out a completely reworked integration that has drastically improved the accuracy of our spam filtering.

If you haven’t already, please make sure you enable Akismet in your IntenseDebate account at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-moderation.

Please give us a shout at support@intensedebate.com if you continue to encounter spam issues. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features,News

We’re stoked to introduce our latest plugin, Facebook Share for Comments. This nifty plugin was written by Jon, the master code ninja himself, and gives your commenters the option to click to share their comments on Facebook after they post.

While we have offered this as standard integration with our Facebook Connect feature, the new Facebook Share for Comments plugin gives all commenters (IntenseDebate, WordPress.com, Facebook Connect, Twitter Sign-in, and Guest users) the option to post back to their Facebook activity stream when they comment.

After posting a comment, just select the “Share on Facebook” button → connect to your Facebook account (if you’re not already logged-in) → customize the message you’re posting in your activity stream → hit submit!

The implementation is similar to our Facebook Share button plugin, so you don’t need to setup a new Facebook app or enter a Facebook API Key. Like all of our plugins, you just have to go to your Plugins Directory at http://intensedebate.com/plugins, select the “Activate” link next to the plugin, and voilà, the plugin is activated and ready to use in your comments. There’s no additional code for you to manually install, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty messing around with your template.

Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-slick plugin? Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation. You can also check out our Plugins blog post for more information.

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features

Happy May 5th everyone. To celebrate we’ve released two updates: bit.ly URL’s for tweeted comments, and comment voting for everyone.

We used to use tinyurl.com for link shortening when you sent a simultaneous tweet when commenting. Now we’ve switched to bit.ly and you can track real-time click data for your tweets.

And in the spirit of freedom, we have enabled comment voting for everyone: IntenseDebate, WordPress.com, Facebook Connect, and Twitter Sign-in users, along with Guest commenters.

Both of these updates have been requested frequently so we’re happy to deliver. Enjoy!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re stoked to announce that our WordPress.com user account auto-login feature is back up and running.  We had disabled it briefly while we made some backend changes to the way this feature works, and it’s more solid than ever. This means that if you’re a WordPress.com user and you’re logged into your account, you’ll automatically be logged into IntenseDebate as well.  All you have to do is type your comment and hit submit.

Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features,News

At long last the wait for Right-To-Left text in IntenseDebate is over!  We’re also stoked to introduce 9 new translations for your comment section. Without further ado, here are our new languages and the awesome folks who translated them:

• Dutch – Mark Kater
• Finnish – Juhani Heiskanen
• Hebrew – Matthew Ellis, Yoav Farhi
• Indonesian -Teguh
• Japanese – Atsushi Matsuura, Naoko McCracken
• Norwegian Bokmål – Stig Morten Myre
• Portuguese (PT) – Zé Fontainhas
• Romanian – Bogdan Andronic
• Vietnamese – Huân H

Hats off to all of our volunteers for their hard work, and many thanks to Yoav and Beau for their work on RTL – it was a major undertaking and we couldn’t have done it without them.

IntenseDebate is now available in 33 languages that are available in your account at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-account:

Arabic	Dutch	German	Malay	Russian	Turkish
Bulgarian	English	Hebrew	Norwegian Bokmål	Slovak	Ukrainian
Catalan	Estonian	Indonesian	Polish	Slovene	Vietnamese
Croatian	Filipino	Italian	Portuguese (BR)	Spanish (LA)
Czech	Finnish	Japanese	Portuguese (PT)	Spanish (ES)
Danish	French	Lithuanian	Romanian	Swedish

We also have 18 other translations that are nearly ready for prime-time, but we need your help with reviewing them. If you’re interested please send me a note at labs@intensedebate.com.

Afrikaans	Chinese	Hindi	Korean	Maltese	Swahili
Albanian	Galician	Hungarian	Latvian	Persian (Farsi)	Tagalog
Belarusian	Greek	Icelandic	Macedonian	Serbian	Thai

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time. Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Thanks! We’re also going to be updating all of our translations in the near future to keep them up to date with the full set of strings in use on IntenseDebate, so if you helped out previously, keep an eye out for an email soon!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features